Missing features or suggestions for historical play...

[BruceM]

Originally Posted by Marc Duffy

Calling all historical players. I'm looking for your help and feedback.

I've seen some threads claiming we have not paid enough attention to the historical side of the game. Of course, we do not believe that is true (especially with the likes of Tiger Fan on the team), that said I'll throw the door open and let you guys tell us what is missing.

For starters, I've attached comments by The Wolf

- historical quickstarts, say one a decade, a minor league team database that automatically adds the historical minor leagues for those who want that

- the ability to have more than two subleagues in a given minor league level,

- either built-in or better support for the Lahman and other databases (have the game create a /historical subdirectory that it looks in for the database files by default where the Lahman or other database would be etxracted to so that the customer isn't regularly floundering around his computer looking for master.csv)

- automatic league expansion with drafts and protection

- the ability to add a league or a sub-league over time

Marc - are these ideas you're asking for all things that will be for 2007, or will some of them make it into 2006 through patches? I'm just asking for planning purposes, as I'm interested in getting an historical league up and running online.

Tks

[targy]

Tudfergusn in historical leagues if you have a draft in June it takes the real players and makes them available to whoever in the draft and then when the 1st of the year comes around no players are downloaded from Lahman. If this has changed please let me know becuase I tried it and that is what happened

[MorseMoose]

Can we get one post that has all of these suggestions?

[Tiger Fan]

Originally Posted by MorseMoose

Can we get one post that has all of these suggestions?

Good idea.

I am just heading out to play hockey right now but when I get back late this evening I will consolidate this into 1 post and put it in the historical simulations section of the board.

[Raidergoo]

Originally Posted by delta

I want historical weather! All the other games have it, I guess Markus is all about the money now that he's with SI!

I've done historical weather research for OOTP. Some of the data I got goes back into the 17th century.

No, I am not kidding, either.

Is it ever going to see the light of day? No, but we did track down some really good long term weather data for hundreds of US locations. When will it see the light of day? Good question.

[The Wolf]

The suggestions in this thread are great! Here's hoping that SI was reading them carefully and will implement them.

[Zitofan75]

Originally Posted by Raidergoo

I've done historical weather research for OOTP. Some of the data I got goes back into the 17th century.

No, I am not kidding, either.

Is it ever going to see the light of day? No, but we did track down some really good long term weather data for hundreds of US locations. When will it see the light of day? Good question.

17th Century, impressive. Although I'd imagine most of the west coast data isn't much more than 150 years old or so but still, this sounds good.

Any idea on how this might work? Will this or a future version of the game have the weather data associated with the city so that when you create your league and set your team in say New Orleans you'll have the weather already set?

[Tiger Fan]

okay, I have gone through this thread and put all of the suggestions into one thread. I put it in the Historical Simulation discussion portion of the board.

Here is the link

Collection of Requests to make Historical Replaying better


Please keep the comments in that thread to a minimum so it does not get cluttered. Only list new suggestions that you do not already see.

There are some great ideas.
thanks

[Claymore]

Originally Posted by Tiger Fan

okay, I have gone through this thread and put all of the suggestions into one thread. I put it in the Historical Simulation discussion portion of the board.

Here is the link

Collection of Requests to make Historical Replaying better


Please keep the comments in that thread to a minimum so it does not get cluttered. Only list new suggestions that you do not already see.

There are some great ideas.
thanks

As I said in my other email Tiger Fan, you are the man!!!

[Syd Thrift]

One thing that would probably appease the "ghost player" people and still work for the game is to allow players on your reserve roster to be farmed out to other clubs. This was, after all, the genesis of the modern farm system, and you still see this kind of thing implemented today in winter league baseball (which also is broken in 2006). If there was a way to have, say, the 16-teams-in-10-cities league coupled with even a 16-team minor league with the reserves sprinkled in there and getting at-bats along with fictional players, IMO that would work. You could pretty easily, I think, prevent a league from even looking at people not already in its league and boom, you'd have the best of both worlds.

Another thing I'd like to see is a general progression of access to different tactics. For example, no platooning until the early 1910s at least (Bill James noted in his book about managers that the first team to really platoon players was the 1914 Miracle Braves). For another, the addition of LOOGYs (left-handed one out guys) as a role to put pitchers in in the 1980s. For a third - and this would be really, really easy to do wrong - using your ace starter in relief of other starters in key situations in the 20s and 30s.

Long term, we really need the ability to add and delete leagues in mid-dynasty. I know, this is already tagged as a "next year" thing, but I don't like having 20 years of Frank's Beer League followed by the Federal League followed by 80 years of Frank's Beer League again. This is especially problematic when it comes to 19th century ball - what do you do with the National Association, Union Association *and* the Player's Association (to say nothing of the American Association)? It's also a huge deal once somebody with a high-end computer decides to replay a 1920s era game with full minors. What does he do when all those industrial D-leagues go belly-up with the advent of television? Turn them *all* into Frank's Beer League?

Oh yeah, speaking of which... the ability to affiliate unafilliated minor leagues over time would be nice.

I am a fictional-only player, but I'm a historical-fictional guy, so I do concur with a lot of these ideas.

[Claymore]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

One thing that would probably appease the "ghost player" people and still work for the game is to allow players on your reserve roster to be farmed out to other clubs. This was, after all, the genesis of the modern farm system, and you still see this kind of thing implemented today in winter league baseball (which also is broken in 2006). If there was a way to have, say, the 16-teams-in-10-cities league coupled with even a 16-team minor league with the reserves sprinkled in there and getting at-bats along with fictional players, IMO that would work. You could pretty easily, I think, prevent a league from even looking at people not already in its league and boom, you'd have the best of both worlds.

Excellent comment!

[Kevin]

Further to Syd's comment, since this was based on CM code, could a hybrid of the loan system from CM be ported over to this game?

[Raidergoo]

Originally Posted by Zitofan75

17th Century, impressive. Although I'd imagine most of the west coast data isn't much more than 150 years old or so but still, this sounds good.

Any idea on how this might work?

A lot of the ancient stuff comes from the British Royal Navy, I suppose. I really only passed on US data, the historcial stuff is a curiosity I got from the WMO.

How will weather work?

No idea, and when I find out, I am not telling.

[Swimmer]

This thread has been really awesome with all of its suggestions, but I want to take a moment and re-focus on what I think are the two most important suggestions: expansion and adding/removing leagues/sub-leagues.

For anyone attempting to re-create baseball history, the overpowering principle that is encountered throughout is Change. Teams join and leave. Leagues start-up, and then either grow to prominence or fold. Entire systems of leagues (such as the D-minors) occupy significant portions of the national consciousness, and then vanish almost overnight.

OOTP has never been friendly to this aspect of baseball. Expansion has required either tolerance of highly unrealistic line-ups or significant custom intervention. League alignment has never been changeable. While many of us who have been doing historical simming have a large arsenal of tricks and workarounds to get us through the changes, I often feel like I'm spending much of my OOTP time reaching around my back to scratch my elbow.

I think that as awesome as all of the varied suggestions on this thread have been (and my earlier suggestions didn't even involve expansion), they're all secondary to finally getting built-in tools to help us grow and change our leagues the way they did in real life.

Now that we have the ability to build vast baseball worlds, I'm dying to to a re-creation with fictional players of the entire history of American major/minor league baseball, incorporating all 290 or so leagues that have existed since 1871. I'm about to tackle that in OOTP2006, using numerous workarounds to enable/disable leagues and sub-leagues. It would be really nice if the bulk of my work was spent in research and re-creation instead of software manipulation.

[bccardon]

real tranactions

[eriqjaffe]

Originally Posted by bccardon

real tranactions

Due to the nature of OOTP, I really don't see how that would be possible, really. Sure, it'd be a simple enough matter for the game to read transactions form a text file or database and make them happen - but since OOTP isn't really a replay game, what happens if, say, one of the players involved in the automatic trade had suffered a career-ending injury two years previously?

Such things are best left for a game like Diamond Mind, IMHO.

[plannine]

Im not going to try to go into details, since some may not be possible in the scope of the game but:

Financials without Free Agency etc. (pre-1970 baseball)

A way to have outlaw/other leagues come into exisitance (and out)
for Federal, Mexican, Cuban, Negro Leagues, PCL, even Japan, etc.
(that you could try to recruit from......)

A eazy expansion (this has been mentioned many times)

Manager History (of all ML Managers)

[kagnew35]

Why can't we print from the various pages i game? this can't be a difficult thing to add. I'm 70 and have difficulty reading a lot of the screens, specially ones with pastel colored text, so print out most everything, when able.

[<Pion>]

Originally Posted by Marc Duffy

- either built-in or better support for the Lahman and other databases (have the game create a /historical subdirectory that it looks in for the database files by default where the Lahman or other database would be etxracted to so that the customer isn't regularly floundering around his computer looking for master.csv)

- automatic league expansion with drafts and protection

These are something I mentioned before. It's the one thing Baseball Mogul got right. The players are brought into the game automatically (though BM failed from what I've seen to have an option for the player to go to his original team though I think they've built some code in to try to do that). After each season, it tells you the teams that moved and the nicknames changed.

If I had a perfect world, I'd like to see it automatically bring in the following:

Ballparks - Bring in the new stadium and auto assign it to the new team with the proper ballpark ratings and seating capacity

Players - Imported automatically from a built in database with the inherent errors fixed (missing stats such as caught stealing and strikeouts for example could be guesstimated)

Schedules - Any changes to schedules such as number of games played.

Era Settings - Update them automatically when the appropriate year comes up.

Post-Season - An option that can be turned on or off that would simulate the post-season as it was in real life. Not having the series in the seasons it was canceled or changing the length of the World Series "best of" to reflect real life when it was 9 games or more recently when playoffs were best of 5 or best of 7.

All-Star Game - An option turned on or off that would only have the all-star game start up in the correct historical year and not have it prior to that.

Expansion - Automatically done with some kind of expansion draft built in or possibly the option of having the historical players moved to their new teams as they did in real life.

Financial Coefficients - Automatically updated throughout the passing years

Most if not all of these may have been discussed in this thread, so sorry if I'm double posting. Not all would agree with the above, so it would be nice for each to be an option.

[DaddyO]

Originally Posted by Nukester

Lose the fictional players in historicals with minors (at
Past records. If I import in 1983 I want to see the league records up to that point (even if there was a cutoff of say 1901-the import date)

This is right on. If I really want to sim starting in 1965, don't make me sim all prior years to get the history up to that point. Just add the real life stats for prior years into the history. User should be able to set the start date for direct importing of prior years into game history, then set the start year for simulation.